I am facinated by the 'Downes theory of Pedagogy', I truly like the comments on community, understand more about the PLE's thanks to the visuals, completely miss the point of distributed representation (my bad, I am sure) , and am now asking myself how to apply this knowledge in an online Leadership Tool that I recently created for my company: fully agreeing that only exercise leads to meaning and true knowledge...

7.
Emergence• How we perceive patterns of connectivity – Take the actual connections, and interpret them as a distinct whole – Take the distinct whole, and interpret as a set of connections• As Hume would say, our perception of a causal relationship between two events is more a matter of custom and habit than it is of observation.

11.
Meaning• Traditionalist theories – ‘meaning’ is the state of affairs represented or described• But what about ‘redness’, or ‘17’, or ‘power law?’• the concept of redness in our own mind is similar to having liberal as a description of a political party – it is composed of the organization of low-level non-meaningful entities

12.
Organization – Personal knowledge: The organization of neurons – Public Knowledge: The organization of artifacts• A common underlying logic: graph theory, connectionism, social network theory, etc.• If a human mind can come to know, and if a human mind is, essentially, a network, then any network can come to know, and for that matter, so can a society.

21.
Personal Professional Development• Most important to manage your own professional development• The phrase in English is “eat your own dog food” – use the practices to teach yourself• Form, create, and work with networks of other professionals Downes on Personal Professional Development http://www.downes.ca/presentation/217

23.
Education and Democracy• Education is not about remembering a body of predefined content• It is about the citizens communicating what they know with each other• If follows that OERs are necessary for this democratic vision of education• The owners of education are the citizens of a society, not the governments and corporations Papert and Freire on the Future of School http://www.papert.org/articles/freire/freirePart1.html

28.
Diversity (2)• Putnam, Florida, and the rest of it• Homophily and associationism http://www.downes.ca/post/53544 http://profesorbaker.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/homophily-and-heterophily- what-fires-together-wires-together-cck11/• Teaching what we have in common instead of our differences? Nohttp://secondlanguagewriting.com/explorations/Archives/2007/August/TheDownsideofDiversity.html

30.
The Importance of Open Educational Resources• Enables people to pursue their own personal interests in their own way• But, more importantly, OERs become the medium of communication• We need to view OERs, not as resources created by publishers at great cost, but as created by learners to interact with each other• The role of professionals and publishers becomes the production of ‘seed OERs’